Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 5th, 2025

This afternoon, from 15:00 to 16:30, we held our Sunday dialogue on the south lawn of the main house of the KECC Swanwick Centre. There were some 14 of us in attendance.

After the introductions, we began by exploring the question of our universality as human beings. This corresponds with K’s fundamental statement that we are the world and the world is us. This might be a nice idea, but did we actually perceive and feel its truth and actuality?

This led to an exploration of the general sense of divisiveness existing between groups and individuals as well as within each one of us. Consciousness seems to be divided, not only due to certain tribal, cultural, confessional and ideological classifications, but in its relation to itself. The notion of identity seemed to stand out as one of the central factors of this pervasive division. But how do we liberate ourselves from it? We might have to come in contact with our sense of self before we ask how to get rid of it. Maybe there is no self.

One of the participants shared with the group that years ago she had failed to find her real self. When she tried, her self split into a myriad other selves. It was then she had experienced a kind of psychological collapse, where she found herself trapped in a narrow tunnel moving towards a light at the end. It had felt like death, and she had recoiled from it in sheer panic. Another participant said that, not having a sensed her real self, she had spent her whole life faking it.

These testimonies were really significant, as they pointed to the multiple nature of the psychological self and its many masks, as well as to the fear of death that goes with the ending of the self. K had said that to find truth we must first go through the narrow tunnel of the self. But when we find ourselves in that tunnel, we panic and pull out of it. So fear is a major obstacle to this necessary ending. Ceasing to fake one’s own identity might be another approach. Or might that liberating death come about through the realization that all identity is fake?

K’s experience during the outbreak of the process was mentioned as indicative of the kind of inner emptying of consciousness involved. As he narrated it in his early work The Path (1924), the process of his inner transformation was a journey traversing the desert of human experience, where truth is not to be found. On either side of the road there are tempting mansions in which to seek shelter, even a shady tree, but the thirst for truth forces the traveler on to his feet and urges him on. So the emptying of consciousness of its psychological content, which is how he defined meditation, may be the more fundamental action in the awakening to the universality of our own being, to uncovering the field of truth.

With the emptying of this content of residual experience and the death of self, the key factors of inner and outer division ceases and then we have the chance to see that we are the world and the world is us, the inner mutation implying a profound transformation in society.

This dialogue flowed rather smoothly. The attendees seemed to be all rather familiar with the process of inquiry as well as with K’s teachings, and everyone showed a willingness to touch on felt or lived experience as a grounding of the more general questions. The mild sunlight also helped, as did the sense of the vastness of space stretching out over the scintillating bay.

 

 Javier Gómez Rodríguez